Hartmann notes the FBI has never, ever issued an annual report on the number of crimes by corporations, even though they're considered people under the law.
Just ask Mitt Romney.
Writes Hartmann,
...when you ask people how most money and property are stolen, or how most people are killed, they think of burglars and muggers and bank robbers and crimes of passion. They think of human persons.
The reality, though, is that more money and property are stolen by or lost to corporate criminals than to human criminals. Mokhiber’s Corporate Crime Reporter notes that in 1998, when the FBI estimated robberies and burglaries at almost $4 billion, the cost of corporate crimes was in the hundreds of billions... as it is every year.
These include:
•Securities scams that ran around $15 billion that yearYes, it's a disgrace. Here's what you can do: Sign a petition to amend the Constitution to declare that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. It's sponsored by the group Move to Amend. Check them out at http://www.movetoamend.org/. You might want to get involved in the movement to repeal corporate "personhood."
•Car-repair fraud that hit around $40 billion
•Insurance swindles and corporate fraud found on your health insurance/HMO/hospital billings that runs between $100 billion and $400 billion a year...a hundred times greater than all the burglaries in the country combined.
